‘Good idea,’ I said, and we fell back on to the sofa. ‘It’s not so terrible here, is it?’
‘No, I like it. I like the order. It’s so clean! In my flat you can’t cross the room without stepping on an old kebab or someone’s face. But here’s so … neat.’
‘So I’ve passed the inspection?’
‘For the moment,’ she said. ‘There’s always room for improvement.’
Which is exactly what she set out to do.
I’m inclined to think that, after a certain age, our tastes, instincts and inclinations harden like concrete. But I was young or at least younger then, and more willing and malleable, and with Connie, I was happy Plasticine.
Over the following weeks, then months, she began a thorough process of cultural education in the art galleries, theatres and cinemas of London. Connie had not been considered ‘academic’ enough to go to university and occasionally seemed insecure about this fact, though goodness knows what she thought she’d been missing. Certainly, where culture was concerned, she had a twenty-seven-year head start on me. Art, film, fiction, music; she seemed to have seen and read and listened to pretty much everything, with the passion and clear, uncluttered mind of the autodidact.
Music, for instance. My father liked British light classical and traditional jazz, and the soundtrack to my childhood was ‘The Dam Busters March’, then ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ then ‘The Dam Busters March’ again. He liked a ‘good beat’, a ‘good tune’ and on Saturday afternoons would sit and guard the stereo, album cover in one hand, cigarette in the other, tapping his toe erratically and staring into the eyes of Acker Bilk. Watching him enjoy music was like seeing him wear a paper hat at Christmas; it looked uncomfortable. I wished he’d take it off. As for my mother, her proud boast was that she could do without music entirely. They were the last people in Britain to be genuinely horrified by the Beatles. Listening to Wings’ Greatest Hits at a reasonable volume was the closest I came to punkish rebellion.
Connie, on the other hand, was uncomfortable in a room without music. Her father, the vanished Mr Moore, had been a musician, and had left behind only his collection of LPs; old blues albums, reggae, baroque cello, birdsong recordings, Stax and Motown, Brahms symphonies, bebop and doo-wop, Connie would play them to me at every opportunity. She used songs rather like some people — Connie, for instance — used alcohol or drugs; to manipulate her emotions, raise her spirits or inspire. In Whitechapel she would pour immense cocktails, put on some obscure, ancient crackling disc and nod and dance and sing and I’d be enthusiastic too, or enthusiastically feign it. Someone once defined music as organised sound, and much of this sound seemed very badly organised indeed. If I asked, ‘Who is this singing?’ she’d turn to me open-mouthed.
‘You don’t know this?’
‘I don’t.’
‘How can you not know this track, Douglas?’ They were ‘tracks’, not songs.
‘That’s why I’m asking!’
‘What have you been doing all your life, what have you been listening to?’
‘I told you, I’ve never really been that into music.’
‘But how can you not like music? That’s the same as not liking food! Or sex!’
‘I do like it, I just don’t know as much as you.’
‘You know,’ she would say, kissing me, ‘you are extremely lucky that I came along.’
And I was. I was extremely lucky.
My cultural education was not confined to music, but extended all the way to contemporary dance, a form that I found entirely impenetrable, entirely opaque. There seemed to be no language for it. What was I meant to say? ‘I liked the way they threw themselves against the wall’?
‘It’s not about what you liked and didn’t like,’ Connie would reply, ‘it’s about what it made you feel.’ More often than not, it made me feel foolish and conventional. The same applied to theatre, which had always seemed to me like a funereal form of television; since the time of the Greeks, had anyone ever left a play saying, ‘I just wished it were longer!’ Clearly I’d been going to the wrong shows. We saw plays in tiny rooms above pubs and promenaded around vast warehouses, saw a blood-soaked Midsummer Night’s Dream set in an abattoir, a pornographic Private Lives, and I was never bored. How could I be? It was a rare night in the theatre that didn’t involve someone brandishing a dildo, and over time I became inured, or at least learnt to disguise my shock, because if this was a cultural education, it was also a form of audition. I wanted to like what Connie liked because I wanted Connie to like me. So things were no longer ‘wacky’. Now they were ‘avant-garde’.
In fairness, I enjoyed a great many of the cultural events, particularly the movies (‘films’ we called them now), which were very different to the escapist fare I had previously favoured, and rarely featured interstellar drive, a serial killer on the loose or bombs counting down to zero. Now we went to the cinema to read. Little independent cinemas that sold coffee and carrot cake and showed foreign films about cruelty, poverty and grief; occasional nudity, frequent brutality. Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill? No, said Connie, exposure brought understanding. Only by confronting the worst traumas of life could you comprehend them and face them down, and off we’d trot to watch another play about man’s inhumanity to man. On which subject, we also went to gigs — it amused Connie to hear me say the word ‘gig’ — and I’d do my best to jump around and make some noise when told to do so.
The opera, too. Connie had a friend who worked at the opera — of course she did — and we’d get cheap tickets to see Verdi, Puccini, Handel, Mozart. I loved those evenings, often more than Connie, and if the director had transposed the action of Così fan tutte to a Wolverhampton dole office, I could still close my eyes, reach for her hand and listen to that wonderfully organised sound.
Do I sound like a philistine? Unsophisticated and uncouth? Perhaps I was, but for every gritty four-hour film about Gulag life, there was another that was stylish, intelligent and affecting in ways that were rarely found in the multiplex. Even the dance was beautiful in its way, and I was grateful. My wife educated me; a common phenomenon, I think, and one that is rarely or only begrudgingly acknowledged by the husbands that I know. As a scientist, I had sometimes been sceptical and resentful of the great claims made for The Arts — widened horizons, broadened minds, freed imagination — but if culture was improving then yes, I was improved. And yes, I know, Hitler loved the opera too, but I still felt strongly that my life had been altered in some indefinable way. I hesitate to use the word ‘soul’. Certainly life felt richer, but was this due to contemporary dance or the person by my side?
I’m troubled by the past tense. Connie was, Connie once, Connie used to. In the early days of our relationship, we made a vow: we would never be too tired to go out, we would always ‘make an effort’, but this was one of those solemn vows we were destined to break. Perhaps there were simply fewer things she wanted to show me, but we gradually became less adventurous after we married, after we left London, after we became parents. Inevitably, I suppose; you can’t go on dates for twenty-four years, it’s not practical. And who would want to go to a gig now? What would we eat, where would we sit, what would we do with our hands? We could always do something else instead. Go to Paris, go to Amsterdam.